The Expectations Arc · Row 2 of 10: Security. Ten rows, ten Sundays. Two down.
"Necessitous men are not free men."
New here? This is row two of ten. Start with #044 and the People Expectations Framework™, both free.
Last week, row one: people choose a job for pay and rarely stay for it. This week, the term that sits right behind it.
Pay is the term people can check. Security is the one they can only feel. Nobody receives a payslip for it; there is no band, no percentile, no committee paper. So most organisations read it from the one number they do have: attrition. If people are not leaving, they must feel safe enough. And this year that number looks wonderful. Quits are down, tenure is up, and the retention line on the people dashboard has rarely been greener.
Roosevelt told Congress that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." At work, the first freedom insecurity takes is the freedom to speak. Albert Hirschman gave the members of any organisation in decline two responses: leave, or speak up. In his account, loyalty does two jobs at once: "loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice." That is exactly the behaviour a low attrition figure assumes. This week's evidence describes its counterfeit.
So here is my position, before the evidence: when security breaks, people don't leave. They stay, and they stop telling you things.
I have watched it happen. Since early 2025, as an adviser and sometimes simply as an outside observer, I have seen a couple of international public-sector organisations restructure after decisions taken in Washington. Attrition was never the problem; in a sector where the next job is as fragile as this one, nobody rushes for the door. What changed was the room. The questions stopped. People who used to challenge a plan started asking only one thing: when the next announcement would come.
Expectation first, experience second, and then the place the gap hides: among the people who stayed.
— Tanguy
This week's content
Row two, read twice: what people expect an employer to guarantee, and what they feel they actually have. Below the evidence sit the second Expectation Gap, the figure for your next people review, and five metrics that see what attrition cannot.
🛡️ WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT 🛡️ | Workmonitor 2026: The Great Workforce Adaptation | Randstad (2026) | Has security become old-fashioned in an age of portable careers? Randstad's survey of 27,062 workers and 1,225 employers across 35 markets says no: 74% call job security important in their current or next job, close behind pay (81%) and work-life balance (78%). When asked the main reason they stay, 23% name job security, tied with pay. 46% worry about how economic uncertainty affects their job security. In Germany, security is the first reason to stay (39%), ahead of work-life balance. People rarely ask for security. They assume it, like a floor, until it moves.
⚖️ WHAT PEOPLE GET ⚖️ | People at Work 2026: Job Insecurity | ADP Research (2026) | How many people believe their job will still exist? ADP put one blunt line to more than 39,000 workers in 36 markets: "I know my job is safe from being eliminated." Just 22% strongly agreed. Europe sits at 21%, Switzerland at 20%. The split runs by altitude: 35% of the C-suite strongly agree, against 18% of individual contributors; 30% of knowledge workers, against 16% of those doing repetitive tasks. The people who draw up the restructuring are the people who feel safest from it.
🌍 WHAT PEOPLE FEAR 🌍 | 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust Amid Insularity | Edelman (2026) | What exactly are people afraid of? Edelman's survey of 33,938 respondents in 28 countries finds 67% of employees worry about losing their job to a looming recession, up from 61% in 2020 and the highest on record; 66% worry that trade and tariff conflicts will hurt the company they work for. Mercer tracks the newer fear: job loss to AI, named among their biggest concerns by 40% of employees in 2026, against 28% in 2024. Then the turn: 78% still trust their employer to do what is right, more than any other institution. People fear the economy. They do not, yet, fear you. That trust is the capital this row spends.
📉 WHAT INSECURITY COSTS 📉 | Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 | PwC (2025) | Does security move performance, or only mood? PwC's survey of 49,843 workers in 48 countries and territories finds that those highly confident about their job security are 51% more motivated than peers who lack that confidence. ADP's figures run the same way: secure workers are six times more likely to be fully engaged and 3.3 times more likely to call themselves highly productive. The income half is stretched: 55% of PwC's workers report financial strain (14% struggle to pay their bills, 42% pay them with little or nothing left over), up from 52% a year earlier. Under that pressure, fewer than half trust their manager, against about two-thirds of the financially secure. Insecurity is a tax on output, collected quietly, and it never shows up on an invoice.
The Expectation Gap: row two
64% plan to stay. 60% are job hunting.
Here is the figure for your next people review, and five things it tells you.
People are holding on to the job, not to you. ManpowerGroup surveyed 13,918 workers in 19 countries. 64% plan to stay with their current employer. 60% are job hunting. In the same sample, 31% expect they could lose their job soon. ManpowerGroup's own verdict: job hugging has replaced job hopping. Picture the meeting. The quarterly dashboard shows voluntary attrition at a five-year low. Someone credits the retention programme; someone else suggests trimming its budget. Nobody asks how many of the people who stayed are also talking to a recruiter, or what they stopped saying during the last reorganisation.
Silence is the first thing insecurity buys. Randstad finds 55% of workers avoid raising issues with their manager because of job insecurity, and 60% seek more reassurance from that same manager. That is Hirschman inverted. Loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice. Hugging holds exit at bay and switches voice off. From the dashboard it looks like loyalty. In the meeting room it sounds like silence.
Your dashboard counts heads, and effort leaves first. Qualtrics surveyed 33,831 employees in 24 countries and found that people who have lived through downsizing or layoffs report engagement seven points below the global average. Employees with five or more years' tenure are less likely than colleagues with under five years to agree that "there is a promising future for me at this organisation" (59% vs 66%). The longest-serving, most loyal-looking part of your workforce is the least sure of its own future. The effort leaves long before the person does, if the person leaves at all.
People lack line of sight. Ask about the next six months and 64% of ManpowerGroup's workers feel secure, down from 71% in 2024. When asked whether their job is safe from being eliminated, 22% of ADP's workers strongly agree. People trust the next six months; the job itself, far less. Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt defined job insecurity in 1984 as "perceived powerlessness to maintain desired continuity in a threatened job situation." The word doing the work is powerlessness. Call the missing piece line of sight: what will change, what will not, and what they would do if their role went. That is why it runs by altitude. Aon finds 22% of founders and C-suite executives believe AI will significantly replace jobs in their field, against 11% of entry-level employees. Leaders can see the weather coming. Most of their people cannot.
Set the two halves of the row side by side: in Randstad's survey, 74% call job security important; in ADP's, 22% strongly agree their job is safe from being eliminated. Two surveys, two samples, two different questions, so read the distance as direction, not as a measured gap. But the direction is the whole row: three in four want it; about one in five is sure of it.
Row two, side by side: expectation against experience. The December workbook adds one of these each Sunday.
Replace the promise you stopped making. The promise most organisations have quietly stopped making is continuity. Nobody announced it. The vocabulary simply moved from "career" to "journey". Rosabeth Moss Kanter named the replacement in 1989: when employers can no longer offer employment security, they can still offer employability security, the confidence of being worth hiring elsewhere. ADP's data says the trade still works: workers who feel their employer invests in their development are 5.3 times more likely to feel secure. And candour pays. PwC describes an insurer that told its people early that automation was coming and that the company would likely shrink through natural attrition. Trust went up because employees felt respected.
If you cannot offer job security, offer employability, and say so out loud.
Your turn. When did your own manager last tell you what will not change in your role this year? Hit reply; I read every one. And if you know a leadership team about to celebrate record-low attrition, forward this before the slide goes up.
📏 Five metrics for row two
No new inventions: five established measures, read together rather than one by one.
Regretted voluntary turnover, read against engagement. Falling exits with falling engagement is hugging. Low attrition is good news only if engagement holds.
Perceived job insecurity. The four-item Job Insecurity Scale, validated across five European countries. Break it down by level: if insecurity runs by altitude, so does line of sight.
Speak-up rate. The share who agree they can raise a problem with their manager without risk, from Edmondson's team psychological safety items. Randstad's 55% in your own data.
Internal fill rate. The share of vacancies filled by internal candidates. It is employability security, measured.
Redeployment rate. In any restructuring, the share of affected employees placed in another internal role rather than exited, and the weeks it took.
Next week — #047
🎓 Row three: Employability — Sunday 18 October
Security asks whether the job will hold. Employability asks whether you will, if it doesn't. Next week reads the third Expectation Gap: people expect to be kept marketable outside, not only useful inside, and most organisations measure only the second half.
Ten rows, ten Sundays. In December, subscribers receive the complete Expectation Gap: all ten rows in one workbook, with the questions and five metrics for every row. Stay for the set.
— Tanguy
Mini-lexicon
Staying, Not Saying — the row-two finding: when security breaks, people stay and go quiet. Exit is held at bay, voice is switched off. This edition's frame.
Job hugging — ManpowerGroup's term for holding on to a job out of caution rather than commitment. 64% plan to stay; 60% are looking.
Line of sight — whether a person can see what will change, what will not, and what they would do if their role went. The part of row two leaders have and most of their people lack.
The Expectation Gap (row two) — the distance between "that my job and income will hold" and what people judge they are getting, read two ways: is continuity credible, and does income cover the cost of living? This edition's measure.
Employability — to be kept marketable outside, not only useful inside. Read next Sunday through two questions: do skills stay current, and is another job findable? Row three.
Method
The Expectation Gap sits inside the People Centricity Methodology™: Empathise, Strategise, Realise, Analyse. It is Empathise made measurable, the first two links of the People Centricity Formula™, read one row at a time.
References
Aon. (2025). Employee sentiment study 2025: Valued and valuable. Aon plc.
Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Expectations Framework™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/people-expectations-framework
Edelman. (2026). 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer global report: Trust amid insularity. Edelman.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Greenhalgh, L., & Rosenblatt, Z. (1984). Job insecurity: Toward conceptual clarity. Academy of Management Review, 9(3), 438–448. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1984.4279673
Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press.
Kanter, R. M. (1989). When giants learn to dance: Mastering the challenges of strategy, management, and careers in the 1990s. Simon & Schuster.
ManpowerGroup. (2026). Global talent barometer 2026: Report and key findings. ManpowerGroup. https://www.manpowergroup.com/en/insights/january-2026-global-talent-barometer
Mercer. (2026). Global talent trends 2026: Driving exponential performance: Solving the human-machine equation. Mercer.
PwC. (2025). Global workforce hopes and fears survey 2025: Rewiring the future of work. PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Qualtrics XM Institute. (2026). 2026 global employee experience trends. Qualtrics. https://www.qualtrics.com/en-au/ebooks-guides/employee-experience-trends/
Randstad. (2026). Workmonitor 2026: The great workforce adaptation. Randstad N.V. https://www.randstad.com/workmonitor/
Richardson, N., Hayes, M., & Northup, J. (2026). Today at work, 2026 issue 1: People at work. ADP Research.
Roosevelt, F. D. (1944, January 11). State of the Union message to Congress. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
Vander Elst, T., De Witte, H., & De Cuyper, N. (2014). The Job Insecurity Scale: A psychometric evaluation across five European countries. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 23(3), 364–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2012.745989
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